Janet Leombruni is a Connecticut based painter, known for her figurative work, described as expressive realism. Her work portrays the everyday life of family, friends, and students, using tropes of fables, literature, nursery rhymes or myths. It is framed as narrative figurative painting that often puts viewers into tense, morally complicated, or emotionally ‘raw’ situations rather than neatly resolved stories. This points to a social-realist impulse: painting as witnessing, without turning people into symbols, and using realism for empathy and discomfort rather than prettiness.  Vivid colors, motion in textures, and design dominate her work.

Leombruni asks the viewer to wonder:  what is going on here?